Many Pirate Parties face the question of how to delegate power and representation. How to ensure that someone who is entrusted with a representative task for the party or political power in an elected institution or as president of the party is accountable and responsible is by no means easy.

One of the more common fears in Pirate Parties is that people holding double representative roles (president/elected member of parliament or treasurer in two organisations at the same time) will abuse their power in both roles. I will argue that double representation is not necessarily a problem.

An elected member of parliament has staff that helps ensure that the member (the representative) is efficient in its task of representation. That means an elected member of parliament with a steady income and staff stands a better chance of exercising the double role as president of the party responsibly than a president of the party who has a full-job on top of their representative role in the party.

In the Swedish Pirate Party one of the consequences of not having double representation is that one of our elected members employs both the previous president of the party and the present president of the party. This means that both the present and former highest representatives of the party are in a position of financial dependence to the elected member. This is clearly disadvantageous to the power balance in the party. The MEP can set the agenda for their staff, rather than having their staff help them exercise the agenda of the party.

For instance the Czech Pirates would not want to put themselves in that situation.

If the elected member is on the other hand at the same time a chairperson, they will have two separate representative roles. The party can exercise better control over both representative tasks, and the MEP/president can also have help and assistance from full-time enployed people in ensuring the correct exercising of both tasks.

Rather than having one representative role controlling the other, the double representation means that both representations can be exercised well and with help.

The fear of concentrating too much power in one individual is perfectly valid, and it's good to consider this, but one should not solve this fear by creating even worse situations. It is anyway clear that an elected member of parliament will have good resources to exercise their work full-time. So the question then rather becomes whether one wants the president of the party to have similarly good resources, or if one wants the president to be dependent on someone to lead the party.